I love NYC Subway signage so much I even based part of my architecture thesis project on it. The signage system is not one man’s effort, but a collaboration of designers and workers (and committee members) over time.

I was at the lecture last night, on “Unimark International and the New York Subway System”, which talked about the signage system and how it came along.

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I have to take back my criticisms a couple weeks ago on these fine music folks.

Marvelous Flickr photoset of tonight by zimbablade

I first saw the Decemberists by recommendation with a group of friends. I did not know any of their songs but still managed to have a great time, because their frontman, Colin Meloy, is an expert in interacting with the crowd. Besides talking a lot (really a lot) between songs, he has lots of stage antics that sets the band apart from the rest. For example, he would divide the crowd in half, and conduct them to sing along in an extended chorus, or invite people from the floor to replace the guitarists for a fake jam, and so on. I enjoyed the show a lot, and soon the songs were catchy enough they ended up in my record collection.

They did none of that tonight.

At least before encore. Instead of going for their usual stunts, they went for the extraordinary: The gutsy band dared to play their new album in its entirety. Their new album, "The Hazards of Love", does not sound exactly outstanding on record and received mixed reviews, but that is because we will not understand it until we see it performed live in its entirety: It is really meant to be a rock opera.

A non-stop, intense ride of music telling a tragic love story with precise and pristine musical sensibility, the show is a blend of genres from the last whole century: folk, bluegrass, metal and rock all melt into one album. And unlike most records, the album is arranged to be playable live, thus the lack of strange sound samples or hooks. Despite the fact, they still manage to create great aural textures with a combination of many instruments, from chime to mandolin, a harpischord as well as a grand bass viola.

Colin Meloy does not exactly have the best voice (he sometimes cannot hit certain pitches), but that’s ok, he has great energy and emotion. Meanwhile, the female vocals were also highlight tonight. I love the commanding voice of Sarah Worden from My Brightest Diamond especially. I might check out their albums in the mean time.

Here is one of the highlights, “The Rake’s Song” (plus free download), a twisted wicked tale of a mass murderer who killed all of his sons and daughters, featuring 4 sets of drums playing simultaneously! Amazing! Enjoy!

As discussed with my circus friends, there are four types of circus, c, q, k and x:

1. Circus, with a ‘c’: Family circus. Happy frowns, dancing clowns, screaming sounds, flying hounds. Examples: Big Apple Circus, or clowns that visit your school.
2. Cirque, with a ‘q’: Artsy circus. Costumee di elaborato, musique de fancie, dancez with Buton, and no animal cruelty. Examples: Cirque du Soleil, Spiegeltent, cabarets.
3. Cirkus, with a ‘k’: Freak circus. Nails through the nose, swords through the throat, fire strikes the pose, pinbed without clothese. Examples: Coney Island Sideshow, 999 Eyes.
4. Circux, with an ‘x’: Adult circus. Ooo, it’s a pole. There, it’s a hole. Aaah, it’s a whip. Yeaaah, it’s a nip. Examples: The Moulin Rouge (back in the days), or pole dancers in your New Orleans neighborhood speakeasy.

I watched quite a few this year. I played in one. Here are my short reviews.

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In chronological order from left to right: Office 12 alpha, Office 2007 (12 final), Office 14 alpha

The story of the Ribbon

It has been a long time since Jensen Harris had first posted his design processes for Office 2007. I enjoyed reading it a lot, as he explained every step in detail, from how the design had evolved to how feedbacks were made into use. He had not updated his blog ever since, and then the next version of Office quietly kicks into development.

One of his major contributions was the “Ribbon”, as a way to consolidate all toolbars and to prevent a degrading experience due to accumulating toolbars and moving buttons around unknowingly. Basically, menus and toolbars are melt into one new paradigm, where buttons are not sized, hidden and positioned the same simply for organization and consistency, but also grouped, sized and visualized by importance and the power of suggestion through visual effects.

The Ribbon has ever since become the talking point of most reviewers and users, and soon Office 2007 becomes the example of how an old software can be revolutionized through UI. It has become so successful that the Windows division decided to bring the Ribbon interface over to its apps, for example, Paint, WordPad and Windows Live Movie Maker. (As a note, the default UI of Trillian Astra is also influenced by the Ribbon, but that’s another blog post.)

Throwing a Fitt!

However, the problem comes when Windows 7 begins adopting the Ribbon. As if Mr. Harris had retired from user interface design, the experience begins to disintegrate through its newer iterations, perhaps through decisions of other designers (who think they know best).

Though the changes are subtle, they are also disturbing and they show the lack of understanding of some very basic concepts:

1. Lack of visual distinctions

Let’s begin with the small visual details. While replacing boxes with separators considerably cleaned the interface up, the original boxes are not that suffocating to justify its removal. Instead, without the boxes, it is much harder to tell what functions belong together.

Top: Clean, distinctive grouping of functions (Office 2007)
Bottom: A clusterfsck of vertical noises (Office 14 Alpha)

Besides, not only the separators cannot do the job of the boxes, they contribute even more visual noises than the boxes. In attempt to make the separations clear, the designers put a darker line for the separators than the boxes. The result is that the lines have gotten so dark it is now fighting with the icons.

2. Where is the title bar again?

 
Top: I’m editing "Document" (WordPad in Windows Vista)
Middle: So I’m editing… uh… "Document" (WordPad in Windows 7)
Bottom: Wait, what am I editing? (Word 2007)

Strangely enough, the title bar in Office 2007 is centered, while the title bar in Windows 7 is aligned left. And Office 14? Centered. The title bar is important because there is no other way a user can tell what document they are editing. When one glances at the usual position, i.e. top left, one will find that the title is not there, but instead, jumping around the center, depending on how many contextual tabs you had opened.

3. Realignment of the Orb

Besides the minute changes above, the biggest offender is that they moved Office menu button. While the Office orb is not the most elegant solution, moving the menu button down with the tabs is worse. The reason?

Yes, Fitts’s Law. Of course.

In the original Office 2007 design, the Office menu occupied the whole top-left corner. Comparing the new design, it had two obvious benefits:

1. The orb is twice bigger. Therefore, when the window is floating, it is twice easier to click. And besides the physical benefit, a bigger button is distinctive. It is like putting a watermelon between apples, versus putting an orange between apples. While you can still point out that there is an orange upon closer look, a watermelon is a lot more obvious.

2. The orb is infinitely bigger when the window is maximized. Though not visually represented, it was coded so that you can simply push the cursor to the top left of the screen to click the button.

The functions included in the menu justified the placement of the orb. It was a very good design for it reduced a previously menu-ridden Office into just one menu – an impressive feat indeed.

To add salt to injury, its replacement in Office 14 alpha is nowhere as good. Back in the topleft corner is the useless window menu, which consists of ‘move’, ‘minimize’ and other boring functions that are much better performed by the mouse.

And worse, the Office orb is squeezed to look like… a tab. WHY? A menu looks NOTHING like the rest of the tabs in the ribbon. This is very bad design because it breaks user expectations, especially when users are nowhere familiar with the Ribbon yet. While users just learned that "all tabs switched the whole top toolbar away", now they would think that "some tabs switched the whole top toolbar away; but some tabs would blow me away with a full screen menu". That’s BAD.

Above: That explosive Office 14 menu I was talking about. It’s so big the Windows Start Menu looks like a midget.

Nevertheless, they picked the right applications to convert to the Ribbon interface. I can see that the ‘editing’ software, i.e. WordPad, Word, Paint, Movie Maker, etc., will pick up the Ribbon, while the ‘viewing’ software like Photo Gallery or Media Player will be left in the bland icon-less, text-only toolbar-ed interface.

It’s ironic how the Ribbon effectively prevented users from degrading the experience over time, but it cannot prevent other designers or programmers from disintegrating it from its very own self! I guess corporations are amnesiac by their nature. What’s the point of patenting and protecting the design, when they are the first people to wreck it?

Please come back, Mr Jensen Harris!

New York subway have finally made its step forward to the 1990′s with a new set of trains, and I’m very pleased with them. It features a few good designs that are unique to the New York subway system. Here is my brief photo encounter:

As there are way too many stations in the New York subway, it is impossible to fit the whole subway map on the display. As a result, only stations on a single line are displayed. The use of a completely electronic display allows trains to be coordinated to run on other lines for peak hours. There is also a LCD monitor on the far left to allow display of various subway promotions.

This is a nice flushed detail for accommodating the altering roof heights. The black plexiglass blends in with the LCD display very well. Commuters are amazed by this detail as they ride to the Hipster Capital.

There are external speakers on every train. This is necessary for New York subway because it is almost impossible for MTA to install a speaker system on its 500+ platforms. Putting speakers on the train ensures that stations are announced properly instead of the train operator speaking gibberish.

Somewhere in East Hampton, architects (and artists, or poets) Madeline Gins and Arakawa had built a house that defies death. (NYTimes interview)

It’s an adventurous sandbox enclosed within the protective shelter of a box. That’s what fending off bears in wild nature cannot give you. The green ceiling reminds you that you are protected in the grace of architecture.

While adults put expensive toys (e.g. stereo, cars, gym equipment) inside their house, in this case, all those expensive toys happened to be a playful (and challenging) landscape.

This is like playing in a MMORPG/Second Life sandbox in your Xbox or Playstation, but now magnified to reality… but what isn’t?

You can climb around the landscape the house, and reach the orange electric socket on the ceiling.

The artists declared that the design of the house is not to make you accept reality, but to defy it.

It’s the best house ever, yet.

There were two major tech sites on the Internet in the Blogging Age: Engadget and Gizmodo. To satisfy their readers’ neverending lust for gadgets, they chase after new releases like paparazzi. To entice their readers, they introduced humor, and later wit. And when the readers become bored by wit, they introduced sh*t-talking, to harmonize with the anonymous comments that were as disrespectful. When even sh*t-talking is not enough, they introduce rumors, false rumors, biased reviews, and disposable reviews that did not even bother using the product fully but focus fully on the joy of bashing. And last of all, photos of girls to make you think you are reading Maxim Magazine.

Of course, there is a limit of how much of these “humors” an average reader can take. Therefore, occasionally, when the editors realize that their readership is falling, they would clean up their act a little bit and do some better reporting.

However, as their readership increase again, the quality of articles decline.

I found myself switching back and forth between these two sites back in the days. The switch is now over. I doubt I want to read either of the sites. There are much more interesting topics to be obsessive about, and there are a lot more other sites that would be willing to spend the time to give unbiased and insightful reviews of gadgets.

To illustrate the last two paragraphs, here is a graph I drew up:

I had used Windows Vista for a year.

Microsoft, in many ways, failed to market the product. It used the word “Wow” to describe how great the new operating system is. Yes, the OS is not bad, but “Wow” is too subjective a word to be used.

For geeks, Vista is not a “wow”, because Microsoft had disclosed way too much information for the 5 years of its development. No matter how good the product is, the excitement is already over for the geeks. New features, in the days of Instant Culture, are the most exciting only when it is unvealed, not when it is being used.

For normal people, Vista is not a “wow”, because it does not save them from their bosses, does not help them finish all the work of the day quicker, and does not attract lovers. And it crashes when the graphics driver is poorly written.

For frat boys, Vista is not a “wow” because it is not a status symbol.

For Apple fanboys, Vista is of course not a “wow”. (Is it just me or is Leopard way too grayish?)

It is a not-so-bad transition, nevertheless. Perhaps it proves that the operating system is slowly graduating to an infrastructure – like the power grid, water supplies or your sewage pipes – an upgrade is not about marketable excitement anymore. It is about “It just works”.

Anyway.

“Astrogirl” – Pentium 4 3 GHz, 1.5GB RAM

The first computer switched over was my home computer, a year ago. (Specs are listed not to show off, but to show you how poor I am.) It seems pretty slow and sluggish in the beginning (and it is sometimes pretty sluggish, like how the text does not appear immediately in Windows Live Writer as I am typing right now), but it seems to improve over time and updates. I plugged in my old hard disk to run Windows XP another day, and realized that the old system loaded up much slower.

In my first install, I had UAC turned off. However, I clicked a wrong link a month or two later in a hazy dreary night, and my computer was filled with spyware. I reinstalled Windows as a result. Soon I realized that most of the UAC dialog pops up when I arrange my Start Menu items. Once I got through that stage, UAC is not so bad. (Someone please make a software to make Start Menu arrangement less annoying?)

I am most satisfied with the ability to view photos nice and big in Explorer and Windows Photo Gallery. Other than that, it seems I could have done most of the tasks in Windows XP… Besides, Windows Live Photo Gallery is now available for XP as well. The new Network Center and diagnostics tool is a great addition though.

“Elian” – Xeon ‘Irwindale’ 3.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM

The second computer upgraded was my office computer, a couple months later. Work is important, so if the work computer is down it would be disastrous. The computer also seems slower after the upgrade, in spite of a better graphics card.

One biggest problem after the upgrade was the incompatibility of critical programs. Flash 8 would switch between scenes very slowly (It bugs Scott a lot, a hell lot), and Flash CS3 was not released half a year later. Paint Shop Pro XI is also painfully slow when saving files.

“Bluebird” – Pentium 4 2 GHz, 768MB RAM, Laptop

Before Christmas I upgraded the hard drive of my laptop (It seems very urgent at the time, but now I forgot why, hmm (ah, out of space to install CS3)) and a reinstallation of the OS as a result. It had always been running XP Chinese Edition, so I installed the Chinese version of Vista for it. To my surprise, the OS is very fast to load – probably because it doesn’t use Aero. However, Microsoft Windows Vista cannot find the drivers for the Microsoft Wireless Adaptor Card. Therefore, my laptop hardly ever has Internet access.

“Alfie” – Celeron 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM

The last computer I upgraded was my family’s computer. Although Aero is not running in this system, to my disappointment, Windows run very slow here. It also takes me a while to find all the drivers.

After one year, Windows Vista is not too bad, but is entangled with speed and hardware problems. I am currently building a new computer these days, and hopefully this will finally be a speedy computer. I still have very hazy memory of a very slow Windows XP Beta 2 on my Pentium II 300 MHz PC though.

All your songs and videos in your pocket? No, more like in your black hole, known as the “Other” files – gone and inaccessible since there isn’t a file finder – in your pocket.

This is what exactly happened after a series of self-triggered connecting and disconnecting of the iPhone. The audio and video files self-destroy into a pile of rumble. The hours I spent closing monitoring and synchronizing these files are wasted.

Don’t even think about the iTunes Music Store on my phone. The DRM-ed songs I buy would be erased in a sync error, or a wipe-out.

All I can hear is the constantly beeping two-tone ‘connected’ sound of the iPhone, orchestrating with the two-tone ‘device detected’ sound of Windows Vista. The podcasts and videos I prepared for this morning’s commute is no more: the last chance of me forgiving this device is gone. Very very sad.

I checked all points of potential error:

• USB port: Unlikely. It is the second USB port on the motherboard, and it is a USB 2.0 connection.
• The USB cable: Unlikely. It is the original cable that came with the box.
• Port connection: Possible. Is the Apple hardware that badly made? But it’s possible. I unplugged and plugged it a few times yesterday already for the AT&T activation.
• iPhone firmware: Possible. It is not the most updated. But then, the firmware update download never completes for me.
• iTunes and the iPhone hardware driver for Windows Vista: Most likely. After all, iTunes never really got fixed for Windows Vista. Numerous reports can be found around the Internet even in the latest version.
• Windows Vista: Unlikely. If it is the problem, my previous Windows Mobile phone would have never worked properly.

So kudos to the Apple software development for PC. You guys have created the worst software experience, and spoiled all the goodness of a good piece of hardware your company had made.

I’m returning the phone tomorrow, so that the total loss will be kept minimal, i.e. $30.

iTunes never fails to amaze me:

Besides the infinite amount of error 3259, this “8.2MB of 7.3MB” progress bar shoots through the roof of my patience.

Nevertheless, I was able to play around Safari browser and Youtube during dinner. Those were fun and great pastime, I must say (I was watching “Hipster Olympics” showing the corner of Bedford Ave and North 6th Street, exactly when I was passing there, and that was quite a wonderful feeling). But then, I’d rather look for Windows Mobile alternatives of those softwares before I explode due to the incompetence of iTunes. Windows Media Player, in contrary, had never given me sync errors like those, and it would show me exactly which files are synced.

There are more detrimental flaws than nice details in the iPhone + iTunes combo that leaves me less and less love for it. My fantasy of showing off the phone to friends in Hong Kong is not worth the headaches of sync failures every day.

Four days left with this phone.